Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to computer graphics and, more specifically, to a technique for searching and viewing video material.
Description of the Related Art
Videos of movies and television shows are made up of multiple scenes. Often a viewer may want to watch a specific scene that occurs in the video. Current approaches to searching for a particular scene in a computer-based video player can be problematic. Locating a target scene can be difficult because the viewer may not know where the scene is located chronologically in the video. Considerable time and effort may be expended in searching through a video.
To locate a specific scene, a viewer may simply play the video from the beginning and identify the scene whenever it occurs. This may be a time consuming approach, particularly when the target scene occurs late in the video. Alternatively the viewer may manipulate a timeline control, often available in video players, to search through the video. Other, more refined approaches provide a single thumbnail that displays a single still scene of the video and may be updated continuously with a timeline slider control. Typically, during the search operation, referred to as scrubbing, network latency prevents a video player from updating the displayed frame until the seeking operation has ended, that is, until the slider stops moving. This approach can work well if the user knows an exact timestamp of the portion of video to be reviewed. In the absence of this knowledge, however, the process becomes haphazard. Further, as only a single frame is visible at one time, large portions of the video may be missed due to insufficient resolution provided by the timeline control. In addition, the video must still be viewed sequentially, and the user may expend considerable effort to find the required content.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a more effective way to search for and view a target scene in video-oriented material.